Re: OT:SETI" P.S.

Heinrich Wolf wrote:
Jerry Avins <jya@xxxxxxxx> writes:

Heinrich Wolf wrote:
Jerry Avins <jya@xxxxxxxx> writes:
Heinrich Wolf wrote:
Jerry Avins <jya@xxxxxxxx> writes:
...
Another example -- this from from Jewish scripture (Torah? Talmud?) -- is the line "Wer lernt sein kind lesen nit, lernt im a gonif
ver'n." (He who doesn't teach his son to read teaches him to be a
thief. "Gonif" isn't Germanic. It may be Slavic.)
On second thought, "Gonif is probably from Hebrew. it has a Hebrew
plural, "gonovim".

In my local dialect (NE Bavaria) this would be:
``Wer seim Kind niat les'n lernt, lernt erm a Dieb wern.''
Anyway, except for ``gonif'', the sentence is immedeatly
understandable for a German speaker.
(The German meaning of ``Kind'' clearly is ``child''; is it ``son''
in Yiddish?)
No, it means child. I translated poorly (and probably sexistly).
I messed the grammar; it should rather be:
``Wer seim Kind niat les'n lernt, lernt's a Dieb wern.''
or
``Wer seim Bou niat les'n lernt, lernt erm a Dieb wern.''
Bou <--> son, _boy_
Wow! What dialect is that?

Why Wow?

Seeing it in print. I recognized it as a possible transliteration of Bavarian, but I'm not familiar with a wide enough range of dialects to know.

It's the dialect of NE Bavaria or better NE of Regensburg on the
Danube. Near the Danube or south of it ``Bou'' would be ``Bua''.
``Bou'' sounds similar to English ``bow''--- I lack linguistic
knowledge to describe it more precisely. When joking, people from,
say Regensburg, call this region the ``ou-Land'' because of the
typical sound there. (And you are certainly aware of ``Bub'' in
Hochdeutsch; also Dieb probably is not really a dialect word, one
would rather use the verb instead.)

Is there another common word for thief? I took Dieb for standard.

As a toddler, I learned English, Yiddish, and French pretty
simultaneously. French soon faded away, and Yiddish never developed
very much (except for expletives) but more sank in than I knew. I
studied Hochdeutch through four years of high school with a refugee
from Berlin, and my accent reflected that. There are many systematic
differences between Hochdeutch and Yiddish, some of them reflect life
in the ghettos and stetls. (Stadt -> stetl.) In Yiddish, Gas is
street, not alley, ans Stub is house (hut), not room. Nicht is nicht,
but also nit. Nichts, on the other hand, is gornisht, nie or nimmer is
keinmul, immer is (what else?) allemul. Sprechen becomes reden,
etc. Werden morphs to vern and etwas to eppes. Oddly, Yiddish has no
simple past. Ich gay, ich hub gegangen. The 'ch' in "ich" is the same
as the 'ch' in "machen"; no Prussian softening.

From reprinted documents in books on history, or a reprint of the
Luther bible, I have some idea how German was spoken/written at about
1500. To me your examples just look like Yiddish is mostly an ancient
form of (Southern) German. There have also been changes of the
meaning of words in German.

Just as Ladino is largely late medieval Spanish. Arabic and Hebrew are similar enough so there's a fair amount of that too.

Some examples

:
At about 1630 a nearby town was fortified by the Swedes with
earth-walls--- these could withstand artillery fire better than the
medival walls of stone that remained inside. The work had to be
done by the citizens and one of the bastions, which was built by
women, got the name ``Hurenschanze'' to honor this. In modern
Hochdeutsch ``Hure'' clearly means whore, but in the 17-th century
it meant woman, probably young woman. Not enough: long ago I was
in Südtirol, the northern part of Italy, where they speak German
(Bavarian), watching eagles near a village where you just
had to cross the crest to come to a village where they speak
Ladinisch (some Celtic dialect) and one of the natives used the
expression ``Hurenadler''. We were told that in local dialect
``Hure'' is not at all pejorative.
Or related to your ``Gas'' example: the (probable) original meaning
of ``street inside a town'' seems to be retained in Hochdeutsch
``Gassenjunge''.

Or related to ``Stub'': ``Stu(b)m''--- the b is almost not
pronounced--- means in Bavarian the (most) representative room of
the house. When they started building houses from stone like
granite, this was no improvement with respect to the climate inside
the house. So the best room got an extra hut of wood inside the
stone walls where this was affordable. So I guess the original
meaning of ``Stube'' is hut; the more as in Swedish ``bastu'' means
sauna (hut) and you can relate this to German ``Badestube''. Also
Swedish ``stuga'' means hut.

So Jews have been the most conservative Germans? I seem to remember
professor H.J. Schoeps wrote something like this from his experience
from the speeches he held in the 1930-ties all over Germany in front
of Jewish communities.

Ah, and reading through once more, I ad corresponding Bavarian
expressions; enjoy ;-)

Nicht is nicht, but also nit. <--> niat, net, nit (the latter more from the south.)
Nichts, on the other hand, is gornisht, <--> nix, goarnix
nie or nimmer is keinmul,

Hochdeutsh English
nie never
nimmer no longer
(from ``nicht
mehr'')

nie <--> nie(?), koimal, koamal, koi oinzigs mal (kein einziges mal) ``koi'' rhymes with English ``boy''.
nimmer <--> nimma

immer is (what else?) allemul. <--> imma, all(e)mal, jed's mal
Sprechen becomes reden, <--> red'n, ``sprechen'' is Hochdeutsch synonym.
Werden morphs to vern <--> wern
and etwas to eppes. <--> wos (from ``etwas''), ``eppes'' appears in non-Bavarian dialects of SW Gemany AFAIK.
Oddly, Yiddish has no simple past. Ich gay, ich hub gegangen. <--> Never thought of dialect grammar, only know that's a very complicated matter.
But I am a native speaker and can't see a way to say something like ``Ich ging''.
Phrases corresponding to your examples would be:
``I gey'' (rhymes with English ``hay'' or ``prey''.)
``I bin ganga''
The 'ch' in "ich" is the same as the 'ch' in "machen"; no Prussian softening. <--> One rather says ``I'' (pronounced like English letter `e') than ``ich'' but then this sounds like ``machen''.

I wrote all that to point out that I spoke Yiddish as a child and German in adolescence, and that it was all a long time ago, and they tend to merge. Lately, I've joined a group that meets once a week to read Yiddish stories. (We just finished a translation of Winnie the Pooh. It's enlightening to see the difference between the Yiddish transliteration "Vini-der-Pu" and the German "Pu der Bär". "Mit bienen ken men kein mol nicht visn" and "Bei Bienen kann man nie wissen." Original: "You never can tell about bees.") I'm beginning to separate the languages.

Once, visiting a friend in Israel, I went to a bike shop to get a part to repair his kid's bicycle. Knowing no Hebrew, I asked the shop owner if he spoke Yiddish. I got a belligerent answer: "Yiddish, or German?" I has said "sprechen, rather than "reden", and he didn't like to be diddled. I answered, "I spoke Yiddish at home -- I was careful to say "aheim", not "zu Hause" -- and German in school, and that was over 40 years ago. Now I don't know one from the other. He accepted that. I got the part.

.... An irony of WW II is that when masses of German soldiers
surrendered or were captured as the war came to a close, soldiers
who spoke Yiddish were assigned to duty as prison-camp guards
because they could communicate with the prisoners.
May be, this was widely misunderstood.
Misunderstood how? By whom?
By Germans. In the sense of ``a war by the Jews''.
You mean that even after Kristallnacht, the Blitzkrieg, and the camps,
the people in the street thought that Jews started the war? Incredible!

Wether something seems believable or not largely depends on the
person's background. One of the most important things when dealing
with history is to get an idea what the _contemporary_ background
was. Also I did not say ``started''.

Granted, you didn't. Growing up in those times and having family die in the camps sometimes warps my perspective.

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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.

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